Law enforcement personnel often carry firearms in their vehicles. These weapons, which include shot guns, rifles, assault rifles and other types of long guns, are often stored in a gunlock fastened securely to a gun rack attached to the vehicle. The gun rack is most commonly mounted either horizontally or vertically at an interior location in the vehicle, and, generally, is mounted in substantially parallel to a planar region serving as the mounting base in the vehicle, such as a floor, a sidewall or the ceiling.
The design of the storing assembly must provide for immediate release of the weapon when needed by the law enforcement officer. Yet, easy access to the weapon can present a problem; for example, if an intruder or other unauthorized person attempted to misappropriate the weapon.
Further complicating the problem is the fact that whereas in the past, law enforcement personnel generally carried only one type of weapon, typically a service revolver, today, they must have a variety of weapons having considerably differing sizes and configurations. The choice of location at which the weapon is stored in the vehicle varies considerably depending on individual preference, the weapon selected and the geometry of the vehicle.
One particular gunlock that is well suited to meet these requirements is made by Santa Cruz Gunlocks, LLC of Webster, N.H. This is their Model SC-5. This gunlock is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,047,771 B2, issued to Tanos on May 23, 2006. The '771 patent is hereby incorporated into this application in its entirety. In summary, the SC-5 gunlock has a pivotably attachable ratchet arm, which resembles typical handcuffs. A plurality of ratchet teeth enables the gunlock to clamp a wide variety of cross-sectional portions of different weapons sizes and shapes.
A solenoid has a plunger adapted to engage one of the ratchet teeth of the ratchet arm to lock the rotatable ratchet arm in position around the cross-sectional portion of the weapon to be locked. The solenoid locking assembly is releasable via a switch and can be overridden with a key.
A slide bar is moveably attached to the gunlock. The slide bar is provided for mounting the assembly to a suitable surface in a storage location. The gunlock is held in place on the slide bar with a setscrew assembly that can only be reached when the gunlock is open.
Although the SC-5 gunlock fully meets the safety requirements of its intended use and typical environment (supervised location such as a police car, police station gun room, etc.), changing demands have created the need for a higher level of security than present with the SC-5. Despite the overall high degree of acceptance the SC-5 gunlock has received in the industry, the Applicant realized that several improvements could be made that would render the lock more impervious against unwanted opening by the use of an extending ratchet latch in combination with an anti-shimming apparatus.
There is not found in the prior art a ratchet type of gunlock as described above that features an apparatus that prevents an unwanted opening by shimming, prevents unwanted opening by forceful opening even under extreme conditions that result in structural distortion of the gunlock.